Just a couple of hours ago we released the first release candidate of the eZ components. The components are the first step in porting eZ publish to PHP 5.

In this release we overhauled the way we are using Exceptions and implemented them consistently in all the Components.

eZ components is an "enterprise ready general purpose PHP platform" that work like building blocks to speed application development...

Just a couple of hours ago we released the first release candidate of the eZ components. The components are the first step in porting eZ publish to PHP 5.

In this release we overhauled the way we are using Exceptions and implemented them consistently in all the Components.

If you have the components already installed with the PEAR installer, you can simply type:

pear upgrade ezc/ezcomponents

and it will upgrade all the components to the rc1 versions. You can also simply download the whole bundle.

If you have feedback, or questions, please use the forum.

From April 26th to 28th I will presenting at php|tek in Orlando. On this third "cruise" I will hold three sessions. In the first talk I will be talking about rapid application developing, using examples from the eZ components. On the second day I'm trying something new: "Derick's Ranting Hour". During this hour I will be listening to the ranting of users about all things they don't like in PHP. If there are not enough people complaining than I will give a shot at it myself :). On the third and last day I will be talking about PHP's improved date and time handling.

You can get more details on other speakers and the wheres and whens of the conference from it page on the php|architect site...

Some time ago I downloaded a large database of cities around the world, with their geographical locations (latitude and longitude). Now that I'm writing an article on the eZ components for php|architect I was going to demo a small import script and a SOAP service that uses this information. But I didn't have the vagest clue where I got this database from, and what its license was.

What I did remeber is that I read it somewhere on planet PHP and with some backtracing I found Herni's post which lead me to the site of MaxMind. This company provides a list of a few million cities including geo-coordinates. They provide it under a very nice license as well. In a few more days I'll be publishing the client so that you can use this Web service as well.

From April 26th to 28th I will presenting at php|tek in Orlando. On this third "cruise" I will hold three sessions. In the first talk I will be talking about rapid application developing, using examples from the eZ components. On the second day I'm trying something new: "Derick's Ranting Hour". During this hour I will be listening to the ranting of users about all things they don't like in PHP. If there are not enough people complaining than I will give a shot at it myself :). On the third and last day I will be talking about PHP's improved date and time handling.

As this time the "cruise" is not in the Bahamas or in Cancún, you should have less problems convincing your boss to send you to this conference. Hope to see you there!

Andi Gutmans (Zend Founder and a creator of PHP) will be speaking at SCALE 4x, the 2006 Southern California Linux Expo on Feb 11-12. He will discuss new features in PHP5, as well as planned features for PHP6.

SCALE is a non-profit community run event in Los Angeles, CA. Presenters include Jim Winstead (MySQL), John Terpstra (Samba), Chris Dibona (Google) and more.

You can still sign up and get tickets, but the Early Bird price has passed. Tickets are only $65 USD regular price/$32.50 for students - so you can't go wrong for a few days full of talks from respresentatives of companies like Google, RealNetworks, AMD, Sun, Novell, and, of course, Zend...

The LinuxTag 2006 will have three focus topics, one of them is "Information Web", which comprises CMSs, Wikis, Weblogs, etc.

If you got something important to say about this topic in English or German: the Call for Papers will end this Sunday, January 15th - only 3 more days!

After organising last year's OscomTag subconference at LinuxTag 2005 together with Markus Nix, the LinuxTag organizers asked me whether I would like to lead the team preparing the Information Web track this year. After contacting some of the OscomTag 2005 speakers, we got together a great group of 10 people:

• Markus Beckedahl ( newthinking communications)
  
• Sandro Groganz ( eZ publish, OSCOM)
• Ansgar Hein ( Anatom5, Barrierekompass)
  
• Daniel Hinderink ( Typo3)
• Alex Kempkens ( Joomla!)
• Boris Kraft ( Magnolia)
  
• Markus Nix ( docuverse, OSCOM)
  
• Christian Theune ( Zope, Plone)
• Michael Wechner ( Apache Lenya, OSCOM)
  
• Oliver Zschau ( contentmanager.de)
  

I am very much looking forward to enjoying this event from May 3-6!